poll Casual players and game difficulty

[Theukon-dos]

Hello. I am working on another essay of sorts, but I wanted to gather some information before writing anything in stone. As the Title states, These polls are aimed at Casual players. Please do not vote if you consider yourself to be an experienced-Veteran player. as it may compromise the data.

 

EDIT: Added answers for if the question does not apply to you. That's on me for forgetting it the first time

[Notecja]

I'm afraid, on this forum most players are somewhere between "advanced" and "veteran", so I believe, you won't get true answers for "casual-middle" players. I don't know any kind of "casual" who would want game harder...

Edit: anyway improvement of AI would be welcome. Sometimes I got pigs stuck away form their homes for ages in game - once for whole 550 (or more) days.

[Behan]

Add an answer on question 3 "I don't want the difficult to change".

My overall opinion about gameplay difficulty is: I don't mind harder content being added, as long as it doesnt overlap on the actual content. For instance: if the Crab King fight was a nightmare, it wouldn't matter that much because he wouldnt be raiding my base.
 

As an advice to whoever wants the game to be more challenging: stop looking up every little thing on forums and youtube. It's a survival game and as such, its core difficult is related to discovering things and getting surprised. It really won't be that hard if you play it with wiki as an assistant

[Owlrust]

I'm just waiting for some "select" people that come to mind to reply to this thread, much like bait on a hook you could say.

Otherwise, I will say this on my opinion about difficulty: Balancing this game would require some careful threading on the developer's part, and any change that is made could be controversial. If Klei believes in changing the way the game works in small or drastic ways, the least I could do is be prepared to work with and accept those changes as well as respect them based on what the developer's truly believe is right for the health of the game, on top of being ready to give my input wherever asked in order to help shape it with them.

[FreyaMaluk]

I think some things are missing like "mid-late game difficulty increase" instead of flat difficulty increase

Also different kitting patterns for normal bosses might be nice... extra attacks or something that adds a bit of variation

[GenomeSquirrel]

Winter, summer, and spring are ridiculous for new players, if they aren’t lucky they’ll die in 2 days. The callous attitude to the “where’s base” crowd doesn’t help.

[GetNerfedOn]

While i am a proud casual player, i have not played the game in a very long while and have no desire to so I won't vote unless i've played to keep the integrity of the data intact.

[cropo]

I always think that difficulty should be rewarded, so I want the game to be harder...but at the same time interesting loot needs to be added to keep me interested in beating that content.

 

If Deerclops just became a ninja that could jump around, throw ice-boomerangs and shoot lasers at me, I wouldn't like it.

 

If, however, a rare variant of a super-ninja deerclops that could jump around and throw ice boomerangs and shoot lasers could appear after the first year, and it dropped an awesome new item like a new high-tier weapon or hat or armor I would totally be on board with it. A big reason I liked the Fuelweaver so much.

 

 

I'd also like the game to be difficult at later stages of the game, and not stupid difficulty like disease or other arbitrary ''You lived for too long so now you can't have fun'' forms of difficulty.

Having a random chance at ''harsh'' versions of each season would be an interesting concept. Like Blizzards appearing in Winter(and a stronger giant), or Dragonfly actively trying to hunt you down in Summer like she did in RoG.  But again for me this would be reliant on them adding new rewards to balance this difficulty.

[Minitte]

Overtime DST has become more of a boss hunting/setup/grind game rather than survival for me and my friends. Hunger, sanity and temperature isn't much of a problem after we found certain strategies around it.

If the game had to be harder..

Maybe like more enemy threats you have to clear deerclops and bearger became tools.

I wouldn't want basic resources to become harder to obtain because it would just extend the time spent grinding resources.

[ADM]

A common "issue" with survival sandbox games is how experimented players will surpass everything unless it's unnecessary difficult.

And I think you know that as I notice the options you had in mind for the polls, optional but rich areas that are tremendously more difficult would be my only vote if I didn't wanted to select them all, there is yet nothing like such in the game (sorry ruins...), and I don't think getting ideas for such biomes would be too difficult, players already suggestions dozens of them.

Right after that, I think smarter mobs would be quite important as well, not only for combat, but nerf meat farming in general as they make the food balance in game inexistent. Pigs and Bunnyman fight each others at no real cost and using stationary sentries like Houndius.s or Winona's Catapult that are out of range for the mobs is too simple in design. They should just return to their home if there's nothing to do and save that information for mobs that respawn from a house as long fighting is not an option.

Again I'm gonna repeat myself like on every difficulty threads but it should be up to the player to decide to challenge up their world, it seems to be something everyone around came up to believe in, so it's about time the future game chapter spice the game, cause I sure think RoT is not looking to make the game any harder but add lore rich features and more activities, which are important too.

[cropo]

An Underwater Abyss biome that's about ruins-difficulty with its own crafting station, resource, and loot would be interesting. It'd also bring up an oxygen management which would add new challenge to the game. If done well, it'd be impossible to have a permanent base there so the player would have to seriously plan out their activities down there and weigh the risks of continuing on. 

 

Maybe make it randomly generate every few days if no one has visited, that way if you die there, it generates a new biome and all the loot you dropped on death disappears for good, making you take death more seriously and putting serious pressure on you to retrieve your items if you do die down there.

[CameoAppearance]

1 minute ago, cropo said:

An Underwater Abyss biome that's about ruins-difficulty with its own crafting station, resource, and loot would be interesting. It'd also bring up an oxygen management which would add new challenge to the game.

So you're saying... oxygen wouldn't be included?

[wigfrids hat]

i am a mid-tier(barely) player, there are parts of the game that i am proficient at(feeding myself) and parts i struggle with to the point of absurdity(not being murdered by anything with range) and frankly the game seems quite fine to me. if it were made harder then there is a good chance that i, or others like me would not be able to "finish" the game(beat each boss and mini at least once, last a full year solo, build all of the things and collect enough tat to make a 'home' out of a base), if it were made easier then the length of time spent playing before boredom kicked in would certainly come sooner and for an endless mmo that seems like a bad idea

 

truthfully if it were up to me to head the ideas department without blowing the budget i would say that to me if people wanted to make it become more difficult then an option to toggle the world difficulty in already-established games would be ideal. for solo worlds the host can either go into options OR build an item in-game that give the option to move the difficulty up by one setting, or in a world with multiple players a majority vote can be had(more than 50% approval at the end of the vote chooses if it stays or increases) and at the start of the next season transition(or the next time the host starts a new session) bushes die, more hostile mobs spawn and if it would not be too intensive on the coding team's part the world temp extreme temp is extended by 4 meaning early spring is colder and early fall is hotter which lessens ideal foraging times for people who do not need as much

 

if they said i was head gave me ten programmers, two artists and told not to mind the budget i would refer to the ruins say "we need more of that!" it seems to me that by far the most liked biome for mid-to-expert players in the entire game is the ruins. a place with exclusive enemies, exclusive loot, non-buildable machines and decoration drops that are NOT required to have a rounded out and enriching game-play. ideally this would be not unlike ruins in what you can do there but instead of catering to wx it should either be warly or wurt angled. instead of gear consumption it should be food-focused and contain exclusive ingredients that can only be made at special cooking stations in the biome and should, ideally, have little or no meat to them so that wurt could eat them and to reflect how much harder they are would have higher bonuses to make them worth getting. to suit warly there could also be at least one stupidly good food that he can cook in his portable pot(to be socketed in the station) one that would either have a stat-modifier that is effective against the main boss or is low-bonus but has an excessive shelf-life(think ratatouille but like with a 25 day spoil time). as for the loot? a new walking cane(with a handle that reflects the biome's theme of course) that has the standard walking-cane speed-boost but also the attack power of a spear would be brilliant since it is still not an optimal weapon and will not usurp strong weapons but it would allow players who like the speed of the cane the ability to fight low-tier monsters without swapping over to something else, it is also not so far ahead of the standard cane as to invalidate it as the value added is good but the effort needed to get one exceeds that of collecting tusks. there could also be a non-meat food drop exclusive to said boss that could be used in one of those special cooking stations. a special drop that would allow you to craft a backpack with the abilities of a tin fishin' bin(max 6 fish though) and a figure-sketch for the pottery wheel. the biome itself would, ideally, contain no less than three biome-exclusive plants(two replantable one not), three turfs(two relocatable one not) and one non-hostile set-piece that only spawns at world-gen on the new turf-type(the way vases and hot-springs do) so that it encourages base-builders to build there. to keep people from being discouraged from lingering(lke they are with lunar island) there would be no aura changes or if there are they could be removed like evil flowers through picking, digging or burning

 

granted i understand that hard-core g4m3rs won't be satisfied but they will never be satisfied in perpetuity even if it was perfectly catered to their current wishes and that the game should be available to a lot of people who are competent at the current level of game play not just the +5k hour crowd

[.]

I want it be harder but this will be a big problem for new players. A boss should get choosen as limit boss like wall of flesh (from Terraria). After beating this boss, game mechanic should get change, so game don't became cancerous for new players and game don't became easy for old players.

[Captain_Rage]

I wouldn't mind some aspects to be harder, e.g. the acquisition of more exotic items and resources, in proportion to the usefulness of the item. My main, or only, gripe is that some of the mundane chores at times are so slow because of random and annoying game mechanics. Want to harvest something while being borderline insane? Sure, most of the time you will get away with it. Other times you will have 3 Terrorbeaks chasing you relentlessly even though your sanity is higher. Or trying to farm bunnies when suddenly your sanity dips slightly and gets taken over the edge because it started to rain 5 seconds ago, turning the bunnymen into beardlords and making it impossibly to farm them. This is more of an annoyance than anything, even though it does indeed make the game more difficult since you have to have all these silly things in mind.

[Yuuko]

5 hours ago, cropo said:

I'd also like the game to be difficult at later stages of the game, and not stupid difficulty like disease or other arbitrary ''You lived for too long so now you can't have fun'' forms of difficulty.

This is my biggest concern when anyone talks about difficulty.  I don't mind a challenging game but it should also be fun.  Things like disease aren't fun, they aren't puzzles, they are chores.  Similarly simply boosting boss health values to some insane amount so that you need to clear an hour out of your schedule to hold F isn't fun either.  Things like Feastclops getting a laser eye IS fun, and things like this could definitely bring new life to the game, although I feel the "difficulty" junkies won't be satisfied with that for more than a week lol.  DST isn't Dark Souls, and even Dark Souls is easy once you learn it lol

I don't play DST for challenge.  If I want challenge I'll play a pvp game.  I play DST for fun, and I don't do things that aren't fun for me in this game.  My biggest issues with the game are when challenges seem to restrict large sections of game play "b/c challenge."  Like summer wildfires and disease.  Due to summer wildfires I start basing in the caves first summer and it just becomes my main base because I don't want to build and fuel a ton of flingos just to spend a hot season on the surface.  Even if there was something fun to do up there the wildfires make it not fun.  Similarly disease limits me from using berry bushes.  I just raid the lunar island for bull kelps or bunnyman from the caves.  A berry bush / gobler farm could be fun but adding the tedious task of digging up bushes every few seasons is just bleh.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

When you learn the basics of how to survive the seasons and beat seasonal bosses, surviving in the surface becomes something trivial and so easy

The game looks difficult in the first hundred hours becose there is not a tutorial that treads us like unbrained kinds but when you are able to surivive more than 1 year its to difficult to die and more when you have so cheap resurrection item like life giving amulet or, if you play with frienda, a single gland and few grass...

I like raid bosses but they are optional so isnt the best way of having challenge in old worlds. A increase difficulty over time and new places with new enemies and loot (islands) could fix this and dont mess with new and casuals but idk what kind of loot they can add when the game has everything to survive in the surface.

Also adding new seasons that comes every too much days, similar like aporkalipsis in hamlet that breaks the cicle of seasons

The food is another problem, i dont use autofarms and still having tons of bundles with food. Its good to be able to make a lot of healing without being tedious but sometiems feels so cheap the way we can get food and more with the new food sources

Also i would like to being able to have world gen option similar to history mode in ds with blocked areas, traps and fields with enemies

[hoppin mandrake]

Casualization of games these days is a sickness that needs to be purged. Make them harder!

[wigfrids hat]

8 minutes ago, hoppin mandrake said:

snip

*casually picks nose*

[Stunp the tunp]

Ima wanna talk about 3 things about dont starve difficult

The learning curve
The general difficulty 
The bosses difficulty

1.Learning curve

Don't starve together way of learning how the game works is what i like to call "knowledge is power",(yeah no lame way of saying it)
Those games are the ones where the first time playing you have no idea what youre doing/supposed to do,or get any item that is necessary for you
a good example of this are without a better way of putting it,stardew valley and the harvest moon franchise
 

Now you are most likely asking "Stunp man how can farm games have any similarity with a survival game like don't starve!?" well you see,in all of those 3 game francise the way of learning and playing them is very similiar and simple,you have a strict ammount of time before some eletric boogalo happens,in dont starve is the harsh seasons coming,stardew valley is making your virtual dad not ashmed of you because of the bad farm you made,and in harvest moon is marrying someone before 2 years or they kick you out of the town (well thats in MOST harvest moon games)

the first day of those games to a new player is something like figuring out how the controls work and some of the mechanics of the game,well in stardew valley and harvest moon they already told you the controls when you first play the game,don't starve doenst hold your hand for the first few days to get you started in the flow of the game (which in my opinion may be the greatest downfall in a new player starting don't starve)

Now the learning curve is some what along the lines of this 


 "goddamit this game is way too harsh with those mobs!" -newbie who died to a koalefant/catcoon 

"you know this game is actually pretty good now that i and getting the hang of it"-finally survive his first autumn and found out you can dig berry bushes up and transplant them

"just killed my first boss! feeling good!"-just killed deerclops and is happy afeater dying to him 8 times in a row

"I have 5 ways of getting food and i survived my second year!"-played for approximally 600 hours and its now a legit fan of the game



i was going to do the other talk about difficulty but got bored